Combining UNIX commands with extensible markup language (“XML”)
- United States Patent 7453593
- Filed: 11/30/2007, published: 11/18/2008.
- Assignee: Red Hat, Inc. (Raleigh, NC, US)
- Href: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7453593.html
Summary
US Patent 7453593 claims command-line processing by a web server of SOAP requests, resulting in XML responses, from and to a remote client. The HTTP Common Gateway Interface (CGI) operates precisely as described in Claim 1. If you POST a SOAP document and return an XHTML response or a SOAP document, this infringes on Claim 2, since both XHTML and SOAP are XML languages. This patent thus claims to own the processing of SOAP documents by CGI programs.
Analysis
I claim:
1. A system comprising: a command-line interpreter (“CLI”) to obtain a text string describing a data processing pipeline, the text string including a plurality of command specifiers separated by interprocess-communication indicators; process-launching logic to launch a plurality of child processes, each child process corresponding to one of the plurality of command specifiers, wherein a standard output of one child process is plumbed to a standard input of a subsequent child process; and remote service interaction logic to accept delimited data strings from a first of the plurality of child processes on a standard input, transmit at least one request to a remote service, and print at least one remote service response on a standard output; and structured document interpretation logic to receive the at least one remote service response on a standard input, locate a predetermined portion of the at least one remote service response, and print the predetermined portion on a standard output.
Claim 1 describes the standard UNIX shell processing model. The CGI architecture uses this shell processing model, where the document to be processed is provided on standard input, the child process then executes, and the child process sends its output to standard output.
2. The system of claim 1 wherein the remote service is a web service, the at least one request is a Simple Object Access Protocol (“SOAP”) request, and the at least one remote service response is an Extensible Markup Language (“XML”) document.
Claim 2 describes a standard web server that processes SOAP documents and responds with XML. Note that SOAP is an XML language, so this covers responses formatted as SOAP documents, as well as responses in other XML languages such as XHTML. Thus Claim 2 covers all SOAP web applications that use CGI.
Prior art
The CGI specification was drafted by Rob McCool, author of the original NCSA HTTPd web server, in 1993 and implemented in practically all commonly-used web servers. SOAP was designed in 1998.
